And the damage simply spread after that.
Two other family children taken on by Chris and Agnes Beach in Winnipeg learned last year that their mother, who had become an alcoholic and a prostitute, was now also a murder victim.
And Adam Beach himself was sexually abused--even though he never so much as set foot in one of the church-run institutions, the last of which closed down in 1996.
"I was saved," Adam Beach believes, "when my parents died and my uncle took me away to the city."
Adam Beach is an adherent to the theory that many natives today are suffering from a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that has been passed down from generation to generation by those who suffered abominable abuses in the residential school system.
It is an idea that was explored in a native-made film by Georgina Lightning, Older Than America, starring, among others, Adam Beach.
"My family never taught me my language because they were taught their language was bad and only English was good," he says. "My parents and other parents didn't want my generation to get their face slapped for speaking our own language."
This was but one of many things he believes was learned at residential school: Have contempt for your own culture, your language, yourself.
For more on the subject, see Why Americans Commit Suicide.
1 comment:
Writerfella here --
writerfella shares that same characteristic with Adam Beach, in that he never was inculcated into his own Kiowan language until, at age 7, he was introduced to his older Kiowan relatives in Oklahoma. He had been raised from one month old in Los Angeles during WWII and Kiowan was a second language that his parents spoke but never had been taught to him or his year-younger sister, Joan. Still, because his sister and he knew his parents, he and she were able to infer what their parents were saying to one another by simple association. Thus it is that, though writerfella (and his sister, now deceased) achieved a nominal understanding of the language, it unfortunately did not contribute to an ability to speak it. The language now is under stress and belated efforts are being made to teach it to the current generation. Reflect that if English was the main language your parents spoke and their original European language only was spoken by them. The sense of loss, therefore, easily should be perceived...
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
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